May 29th was a busy day in Vancouver. Bif Naked played the Rickshaw Theatre, the FIFA Womenâ€™s Cup Trophy Tour arrived in Vancouver, and the Gastown Womenâ€™s TEDx hosted its Fearless event. If this wasnâ€™t enough to quench everyoneâ€™s thirst, the Vancouver Craft Beer Week made an early start before its June opening. In other words, it was a day for gender equity, womenâ€™s rights, womenâ€™s sports, and a deep ethical question of which event would be the most appropriate to attend, in all likelihood with each of them followed by craft beerâ€¦

Miraculously, however, the BCcampus Open Textbook SummitÂ soldiered on and even drew in a record number of attendees. MVP and Open Modernisms were prominent in the proceedings, which means its panel was right before lunch when late risers are sure to jump into sessions (and then eat lunch guilt and gluten free). The responses show that beyond BCcampus, the Open Modernisms anthology builder is going to find traction across Western Canada. James Gifford presented a paper co-authored with Stephen Ross and Matt Huculak on the major innovations coming to BC as Open Modernisms prepares to launch its Phase 1 with a custom Islandora build for preparing modernist texts that are in the public domain in Canada. With its â€œcoreâ€ and â€œmoduleâ€ system, Islandora will allow users to upload PDF page images of documents with metadata, OCR them automatically, hand-correct the OCR, and queue it for moderation.

As a first step, this places Open Modernisms at the ready for Fall 2015 modernist anthologies for classroom use across the country. The key, however, is copyrightâ€¦ Read more

The Open Modernisms Anthology has been awarded $15,000 in grant funding by the BCcampus Open Textbook Project to produce a free, open-access teaching resource. This funding supplements funds already in place from the Modernist Studies Association ($1,000) and Douglas College in Vancouver ($3,500), as well as the MVP ($1,000).

In its first phase, the Open Modernisms Anthology aims to build and populate a site that will host PDF page images with backing corrected OCR text of modernist primary materials such as those typically found in anthologies and used in course packs. Users will be able to mix and match documents, re-arrange them, add their own notes, and output the results as a single PDF document for use as a course pack in the classroom.

In its second phase (being pursued concurrently), the OMA will convert text to Markdown and allow users to download materials in a variety of formats for print, digital presentation, text analysis, and other uses.

The site is Open-Source and the materials it hosts will be Open Access.

We would like to thank in particular the Modernist Studies Association, whose listserv (msa-discuss@chaos.press.jhu.edu) was the form in which the idea first gained popular support. We would also like to thank David N. Wright for facilitating grant funding through Douglas College in Vancouver, and James Gifford for facilitating in-kind support through the Fairleigh Dickinson University in Vancouver, and the Provost’s SEED Grant funding.

We would also like to thank all those teachers of modernism around the world who told us about their anthology and course pack use, helping us to make the case that something like the Open Modernisms Anthology is needed. Many of them will be active participants in establishing the site, and we are eager to begin working together.

Here’s a slightly longer version of the paper I had to cut down to meet the time limit requirement for the panel on Modernism and Big Data at the 2014 MSA conference in Pittsburgh.Â The Mind of Modernism

Peer Review Personas

Abstract

Arguing for the relevance of speculative prototyping to the development of any technology, this essay presents a â€œPeer Review Personasâ€ prototype intended primarily for authoring and publication platforms. It walks audiences through various aspects of the prototype while also conjecturing about its cultural and social implications. Rather than situating digital scholarly communication and digital technologies in opposition to legacy procedures for review and publication, the prototype attempts to meaningfully integrate those procedures into networked environments, affording practitioners a range of choices and applications. The essay concludes with a series of considerations for further developing the prototype.

The MVP is coming to the MSA in a big way this year! MVPers are presenting on panels and round tables, in seminars, in the poster session, and even organizing panels and seminars. Please see below for abstracts and outlines of what weâ€™ll be bringing to the show â€“ and if youâ€™ll be in Pittsburgh for the conference, please check out some of the work on offer.

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What are Versions?

Versions are the different forms texts assume as they move from manuscript to typescript, from serialization to first book edition, and across various book formats during their publication history.
Starting in June 2012, with the serial release of a digitized 1st edition of Ulysses, the MVP aims to spark a versioning culture in modernist studies by making available digitized texts that can be studied, searched, and compared.
You can see much of our students' work at the Maker Lab in the Humanities.